﻿This week’s Climate FAQ is based on the Climate Conversations launch in Dublin this past Wednesday. The event brought internationally-acclaimed experts and artists together to talk about improving communication and action on climate change. The premise of this week’s event was that we haven’t gotten climate communication right yet, particularly in Ireland. If we had, there would be more action by our government and society to solve the problem.

Climate change and its solutions are technically complex issues with significant scientific, engineering, political, economic, legal and social dimensions. It’s difficult for anyone working in climate change to have expertise in every dimension, let alone have the resources to communicate them effectively to the wider public. ﻿

In my own experiences communicating climate change issues to a range of age groups and backgrounds, I have found the public level of acceptance and interest about climate change varies widely. I’ve agonised over how to explain what I believe is the most important global problem of our generation to people who don’t believe, don’t care, don’t want to know, or (most frustrating of all) say they care but do nothing about it (i.e. many politicians).

My poor husband has had to endure many evenings listening to me vent my frustrations on this topic. He’s not as interested in climate change as I am, but he is quite interested in psychology. Hence, between us, we have come up with a theory about the psychology of climate change that I’ll present in this week’s Climate Friday FAQ: Why is there so little action on climate change?

Are we a world in grieving?

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross examined the emotional stages experienced by survivors of an "intimate's" death, commonly known as “the five stages of grief” but originally known as “The 5 Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News”:

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

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If Earth is our “intimate” and Earth (as we know it) is dying, could we be dealing with this concept through the emotional stages of grief? It sounds like a crazy theory, but my husband and I are by no means the first to come up with it - Just a quick Google search on the topic provided over 39,000 hits proposing various analogies between our feelings about climate change and the stages of grief. The five stages of grief do not necessarily come in order or are all experienced by a grieving individual, but Kübler-Ross claimed that a person always experiences at least two of the stages of grief and that some people may never reach the stage of acceptance. It is only once acceptance is reached that “grief work”, or coping and managing the situation, can begin. No doubt these stages over-simplify a complex problem and there are many other reasons someone may not take action on climate change. However, if the theory has any merit at all, to communicate climate change effectively we have to know what stage of grief someone is in and then apply this knowledge to move an individual toward acceptance of the climate crisis so the real work on climate solutions can begin.

﻿The five theoretical stages of climate change grief﻿

Denial

It’s easy to spot those in denial about climate change given the attention climate change deniers receive in the press. In psychological terms, denial is described as the first stage of grief, in which the “survivor imagines a false, preferable reality”. In climate change terms, we only have to question why deniers would feel the need to imagine a preferable reality to understand why they are stuck in this stage of grief.

zerohedge.com

The most vocal deniers are usually motivated for financial reasons. However, there are still people among us who have nothing to gain financially from denying climate change and yet continue to do so despite overwhelming scientific evidence. Denial is a useful coping tactic for helping a person function despite an initial trauma. However, to move beyond denial, one has to acknowledge the catastrophic news they’re faced with. In a world where we can be quite selective about the news we read/see/hear, it’s easy to stay in denial about climate change if we choose.

It’s only when a denier experiences the impacts of climate change that they’re forced to acknowledge the reality, but by then it may be too late to solve the problem.

Anger

Anger usually happens when a person feels helpless or powerless. Think about some of the climate activists you know from appearances in the media and how angry and frustrated they sometimes become over the lack of acceptance and action on climate. Many activists have been working for decades on the climate change problem and sometimes feel no further along than when they started –Such slow progress would make anyone angry. In Ireland, we’ve been criticised for not getting angry enough and publically demonstrating about issues like our country’s economic collapse, but we’ve seen more anger on our streets recently over water meters and the powerlessness people feel as a meter is installed on their property and another bill is placed in their laps without their consultation.

Why don’t we feel angry about the lack of progress to solve climate change?Some of us do, but not enough of us demonstrate that anger to our elected representatives (yet) for them to do something about it. Maybe our lack of anger is due to our own feelings of responsibility and guilt for contributing to the problem. The Change.ie campaign told us that we as individuals had the power to fix the climate change problem by reducing our personal carbon footprint. It’s hard to justify getting angry about someone else (i.e. the government) not doing enough when you know you’re not helping the situation with your own behaviour. That personal guilt is a road block to demonstrations on climate action in Ireland. Anger can be a catalyst to action. Angry people get stuff done, and getting angry about lack of climate action can help raise awareness and support about the problem. While I’m generally not an angry person, I think the climate change problem could do with a lot more anger for our leaders to pay attention to its urgency, but just reacting to anger does not provide solutions in the long-term.

Bargaining

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Bargaining is defined as the stage in which one seeks ways to avoid having the bad thing happen or a vain expression of hope that the bad news is reversible. I bargained my way through my initial exposure to the climate change problem, telling myself “it’s not that bad”, “it’s a million years away from happening”, “it’s up to the bigger countries to solve the problem” and “we’ll have the solutions in time”. Even worse, I told myself that because I’d done things like change my lightbulbs and take my electronic devices off stand-by that I’d done my part to “save the planet”, but you can’t teach an M.Sc. course in climate change and keep kidding yourself with bargaining tactics. Like the denial stage, once you face the reality of the situation, you quickly realise that no amount of bargaining is going to resolve the problem and that this is an “all hands on deck” situation which requires big changes, not bargains.

Depression

I have been through the depression stage of climate change grief, questioning why I work so hard on this issue when there are not enough of us actively engaged in solving the problem. Getting depressed about climate change is an easy stage to fall into when you’re paying attention to the news and watching the Earth break records year after year in average surface temperature, melting sea ice, and rising sea levels. Depression may be the worst stage of all to experience because it’s so immobilising. When we’re depressed about anything, even getting out of bed can be a struggle. By acknowledging and truly experiencing those depressing feelings about climate change, I’ve attempted to protect others from getting stuck in that same stage of grief. It’s critical to emphasise that all the solutions to climate change already exist and it’s only a matter of having the will to change in order to solve the climate crisis. Getting depressed about climate change is simply a waste of our limited and precious time.

Acceptance

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99% of scientist and all professional scientific organisations in the world have accepted human-caused climate change. Acknowledging the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change makes acceptance of the climate crisis inevitable. If everyone in the world accepted that climate change is the biggest threat facing the future of human civilisation, would we be further along in solving the problem? Would we be willing to change our lifestyles and our economic systems, or would we still be trying to offload the burden to another country or another sector of society? Would we still be asking, “what’s in it for me” before we agreed to change? The climate crisis is the ultimate example of the “Tragedy of the Commons” – we behave contrary to the best interest of society based on our own self-interest.

We can’t get to work solving climate change until we reach the acceptance of our reality, but reaching acceptance in itself is still a long way from reaching the solutions if we put our own self-interest above the good of society and future generations.

Why is there so little action on climate change?

In keeping with this week's Climate Conversations theme, I believe a key reason there has been so little action on climate change is because we have failed to communicate the urgency of the problem adequately. We’ve succeeded in moving large segments of society out of the “denial” stage through awareness raising campaigns, but we move people into the “bargaining” stage when we give them the impression that simply lowering their carbon footprint a tiny bit will solve the problem. We’ve avoided expressing anger about climate change because it’s socially unacceptable or because our guilt prevents us from acting on our anger, and the only people getting depressed about climate change are the ones who face the impacts. Generally, we’re a nation of “climate bargainers”, but most of our communication strategies have focused on changing the opinions of climate deniers. Even when we address the arguments of climate bargainers, we only bring them as far as accepting the severity of the problem and ignore the natural human self-interest that still may prevent them from taking action. Time is running out, and we urgently need to think beyond acceptance of the climate crisis in order to solve it.

Going beyond acceptance of the climate crisis

"Selma" - imdb.com

We don’t need everyone in world to accept the importance of climate change to solve it. We just need the key decision makers and power holders to reach acceptance quickly, and we need them to realise it is in their own self-interest to take action. Voters and consumers have an immediate effect on the self-preserving minds of leaders and power holders. Having dipped my toe briefly into local politics last year, I can confirm that the constituents who speak the loudest and most frequently get heard. As a result of my experience, I’ve become far more vocal and forthcoming with the elected representatives in my constituency, both in criticising them when they don’t act on climate issues and complimenting them if they do. The other night I watched the movie Selma, which chronicled Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle to secure voting rights for African Americans in 1965 through peaceful protest and resistance. There’s a scene in the movie where U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson says he’s not concerned about how people judge him in the present but how people will remember him 20 years from now and in future history books. This personal concern about how Johnson was remembered and how the rest of the world judged the United States based on his actions became the driving force in L.B.J.’s decision to unequivocally support King’s campaign. It struck me that our leaders will face the same personal struggle about climate change. While their actions on climate change today may not affect their re-election and immediate careers, their action (or inaction) will affect how they are remembered in history when future generations are either reaping the rewards of aggressive action on climate or suffering the consequences of insufficient efforts. I wonder if our leaders ever think about how they’ll be remembered in history when they prioritise short-term economic gains over long term consequences and the impacts on future Irish citizens…

Back to you…

I know a lot of people (including myself) who have accepted the seriousness of climate change but haven’t made huge sacrifices in our own lifestyles to reduce our personal impact. We own cars and live in energy-inefficient houses. We’re all operating under the pressure of limited time and limited financial resources that constrain how much we can change to help solve the climate problem. Most of us have more immediate problems than climate change that we’re already struggling to cope with. We’re cycling between the “stages of grief” and guilt about not doing enough personally to stop climate change.

The biggest impact we can make with limited time and money is to force our key decision makers to act big – fully committing to a decarbonised economy and fossil free society right now, making them aware of the benefits that could result in swift action. Those benefits could be in the form of votes, job creation, public health, food security, energy security, or even how our leaders are reflected in the history books. If you personally don’t have time to engage with your elected representatives to do this, at least throw some money toward an environmental NGO or a political party who is trying to do so with incredibly limited resources. (My favourites are hyperlinked, but there are several other Irish organisations working to solve climate change.)

Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “This Changes Everything” highlights a paper called "Is Earth Fucked?" by geophysicist Brad Werner, which claims that the earth-human system is doomed unless people resist against the systems that are causing the problem, namely our fossil fuel-driven economy. There are lessons we can learn from previous resistance movements like those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It only takes a critical mass to create a tipping point toward change. That critical mass is happening now through organisations like 350.org and People’s Climate Ireland. We just need to support those movements to ensure climate action happens fast enough to make a difference.

The next Climate Conversations event: ‘A New Economy’ takes place on Thursday, March 26th at the Stanley Quek Hall, Trinity College Dublin, Biomedical Sciences Building. Tickets are free, but advanced registration is essential as these events do "sell out". Videos of all the conversations are also available on the website.

Excellent, really interesting article. We won't get very far tackling climate change without paying much more attention to human psychology.

However, I wonder if your, and most people's, portrayal of "denial" is too simple. Climate change denial has come to mean denying that climate change is happening at all. I'm no psychologist, but Wikipedia tells me that denial also takes more subtle forms than this "simple denial".

A person in denial may also use minimisation: admitting the fact but denying its seriousness; and projection: admitting both the fact and seriousness but denying responsibility by blaming somebody or something else.

With that in mind, I would say we are still very much in denial, myself included.

My take on 'five stages' created a modified approach: from denial to determination. How one can move from not understanding that there is something going on to determination to do something to help solve (ameliorate ...?) our climate crisis. http://getenergysmartnow.com/2008/04/12/the-five-stages-denial-to-determination/